God’s Country
April 9, 2007 by TJM Admin
The United States is a Christian nation? Are you sure? After all, 82% of Americans claim to be Christians. Let’s see how the other stats stack up to that.
- Currently, 64.5% of Americans are overweight and 30.5% of Americans are considered obese. Does this reflect the Christian beliefs?
- 63% of Americans drink alcohol.
- While people in impoverished countries starve every day, almost half of the food in the US is wasted.
- 20.9% of Americans are smokers. So much for the body as a temple, eh?
- 12% to 20% of women and 22% to 60% of men cheat on their spouse.
- 66% of Americans support the death penalty. What happened to all that forgiveness stuff?
And, by the way, the United States was NOT founded on Christianity. In fact, the Treaty of Tripoly, written in the late 1700’s, has this to say in Article 11:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
So please, I beg of you, stop trying to state that America was built on Christianity.
Let’s take a look at the founding fathers:
Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of…Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
George Washington:never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washinton uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
John Adams: “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!”
Thomas Jefferson: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”
James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
Ethan Allen: “That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words.”
Benjamin Franklin :”As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion…has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble.”
How about other people influential in defining our country?
Abraham Lincoln: “It was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no church, and was suspected of being a Deist.” His law partner, John T. Stuart said of him: “He was an avowed and open infidel, and sometimes bordered on atheism. He went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I have ever heard.”
“Under God” was added to the pledge in 1954; “In God we trust” was added to paper money in 1955, and became the national motto in 1956 (replacing E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One)).
Back in 2002, a federal appeals court ruled the Pledge of Allegience, in its current form, was Unconstitutional due to the phrase “Under God”. (The Supreme Court later deemed that because the suit was brought by a divorced father who didn’t want his daughter to recite the pledge (the mother wanted her to do so), the suit should have been handled in family court, and overturned the decision on this technicality)
This nation was founded on the principle that ALL people have the right to follow their own religion, free from government influence. God and Religion are conspicuously absent from the founding document of the country. The constitution further says that religious tests shall not be required.
God was not considered a vital component of this country until the anti-communist mob in the 1950’s overturned nearly 200 years of secular precedent.
[Reply]
The majority of americans are white, too. There are far more Protestants than Catholics. But if we contended that the US is a white Protestant nation, we would recognize right away the logical fallicy of such statements.
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You all suck get a life
RivalArrival’s Note: This is not the “Real” Jesus, but 17-year old science student, Sarah Woo, of Malaysia. Sarah enjoys sms-ing. eating. drinking. sleeping, dancing, shopping, watching movies, screaming, shouting, getting hyper, partying, watching heroes, the Transformers movie, and impersonating deities in Atheist oriented blogs. The Jesus Myth thanks Sarah for her enlightening comments. Personally, I had never looked at it with this perspective. Sarah has given me quite a lot to think about.
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